“Yellow Table” social program brings together citizens who want change

Posted on : 2014-07-14 16:54 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST
The sinking of the Sewol ferry brought demands for change, which are now fading from inaction
 vice president of the Hope Institute
vice president of the Hope Institute

By Han Gui-young, senior researcher at the Hankyoreh Social Policy Institute

“The lesson that we learn from the Sewol tragedy is first that the society as a whole has to change, and second that the change has to start with us. That is to say, we as individuals have to change the paradigm of our life, and this means reassessing and redesigning the basic way that we live, starting with the smallest aspects of our lifestyle.”

Only three months have passed since the Sewol ferry sank, but there are already numerous signs that it is being forgotten. The tragedies that have occurred in the past reveal a vicious cycle in which people first feel anger and confusion, and then forget those feelings, ultimately giving rise to an even greater tragedy. Anger is not enough to keep us from forgetting. Doing something about that anger, no matter how small, gives us the ability to remember.

Lee Jin-sun, vice president of the Hope Institute, said that what South Korean society needs the most right now is for people to act and realize that change begins with them. Lee planned the civic action program called Yellow Table, which is hosted by the Civil Society Organizations Network in Korea and sponsored by the Hankyoreh Institute for Social Policy). Yellow Table is designed to help citizens change themselves and take action after the Sewol tragedy.

Looking back, the situation is similar to immediately after the 2012 presidential election. Back then, zealous citizens who longed for change were firmly resolved to do whatever it took to change South Korean society.

But this resolve didn’t last for long. Many people made the excuse that they were trying to do something but that other people weren’t taking action. “We mustn‘t blame the people around us. We have to take the initiative to say what we are going to do about it,” Lee said.

Lee has a question for us. In the past, why hasn’t rage against the public sector in the case of the Sewol ferry and other tragedies led to change in our everyday lives? “Our experience with public participation has largely been voting, holding candlelight vigils, and, at most, venting our feelings on some internet cafe. We have this strong sense that we need to do something, but since we don’t know what we need to do, that anger has not led to change in our everyday lives,” Lee said.

The greater someone’s political interest, and the more passionate someone is about getting involved, the more severe the “fragmentation of daily life.” Repetition of this pattern places the individual in schizophrenic situations.

Yellow Table is a program that brings together people who want to do something but don’t know what they should do to discuss safety issues and promise to start taking action themselves. “In the past, the main way that we responded to the outbreak of a disaster was to raise the budget, to make laws, and to merge and abolish government ministries,” Lee said.

Citizens were the ones who faced the direct brunt of the disaster, but in the end, citizens were not part of the response measures. “It is important for citizens to ask the government for something themselves and to express their opinions,” Lee said.

For this reason, the main participants in Yellow Table are not experts but rather citizens. The program involves exhaustive debate, with the voluntary and equitable participation of citizens. These participants speak up and share actions that they can take for change, to ensure that the program does not end with debate.

“Yellow Table is a program in which people from teenagers to octogenarians, high school students to university professors, and irregular workers - everyone, regardless of age and profession - get together to share their feelings and to listen to each other carefully. The key is setting up an action plan,” Lee explained. Through this process, participants think of actions that they can take together right away and try to figure out what they are capable of doing.

Individual citizens take pictures of the personal actions and changes that they promised to do at Yellow Table and upload these pictures to Facebook. Doing so connects them with people who have similar concerns and plans, enabling them to encourage each other and leading to specific ideas for action and solutions.

The poster for “Remember the Tears”
The poster for “Remember the Tears”

But it does not end there. In Lee’s conception of the program, these participants will eventually create their own yellow tables in their everyday lives, leading to opportunities for yet others to promise to make changes in their own lives.

“The thing that bothers me the most is how middle-aged people, members of the so-called ‘486 generation,’ bad-mouth politicians and big business and talk about changing the world while they are having a drink, but then don’t actually do anything. After they all go home, they forget all about it,” Lee said. By accepting the discrepancy between knowledge and action, people are effectively condoning and overlooking the corruption and abuses of the powerful. In the end, they are accomplices to these acts.

“When you talk with younger people, you see them come up with solutions as soon as they understand a problem. But with the older generation, it is common for awareness of the problem to be a separate matter from taking action to solve that problem,” Lee said. Lee said that this is because members of the older generation have no experience with trying to think of a solution that would involve concrete action.

“When we take action to change things, even if it’s something small, we feel joy and happiness,” Lee said, explaining that a thousand actions can change the world, like the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings.

Yellow Table will be taking place at 6:30 pm on July 18 at Cheondogyo Suun Hall in Seoul.

 

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]

 

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